February 23, 2016

#Titles and their #Roles which confuse music artists via @IamBreezySays

Last week I wrote about the differences in promotions, marketing and branding. That blog was heavily appreciated and helped enlighten many within the music industry. Based on the feedback and questions received I decided to write about titles that confuse artists within the industry. Many artists do not know what the roles are to various titles and therefore are confused with what they will be getting by hiring someone to join their camp. The four titles we are going to discuss in this blog are booking agent, marketing manager, publicist, and manager.
Here I have broken down the titles and their main duties:

Booking Agent:
An Artist Booker, or Booking Agent, works in the music industry to book performers for concerts, gigs and other live music performances. They often schedule performances and negotiate with the artists directly or with booking representatives or producers to arrange terms of contract, dates, and fees. They may also audition new talent. Artist Bookers or Booking Agents may either be employed in-house or work independently.

Marketing Manager:
A Marketing Manager is responsible for coming up with marketing concepts, working with the creative department on images and advertisements, develop marketing strategies and plans, and present findings to company executives. It is a management position, so this person will likely have a college degree in Marketing and/or several years of experience in Marketing.

Publicist:
The main responsibility of a publicist is to get positive press coverage for his client. To do this, the publicist needs to create and maintain good relationships with journalists by sending them original, insightful, timely story ideas that involve the client in some way.

The trouble with this is there are many “non-professionals” in this business and the reason I put that in quotations is because these people themselves do not have an idea what role they are to play. The artists are so excited to have a team, but many times due to lack of budget they expect these people to do everything for them and tend to get frustrated when a person cannot do it or refuses to.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are many people whom try to play all these roles to the artist because they believe in them so much. My intention with this blog is to explain to those in these positions that it is ok to stick to your position/role and for artists to understand what to expect from your team. Also, there are many artists who simply are not even in the position to need a team, for instance, why get a booking agent when NOBODY is trying to book you or even knows your name? Why get a manager, when you have no business to manage? Hope you learned a little more about, not only the music industry itself, but business as a whole.
Breezy